Non-Dogmatic Philosophy at the University of Chicago
"Where fun goes to die" and philosophy goes to flourish
My masters degree in philosophy came from the University of Chicago.
After studying Christian dogmatics at a seminary, I was introduced to a philosophical method one professor called non-dogmatic philosophy. It was a breath of fresh air.
My seminary had taught that all philosophy needed to start from Christian presuppositions. The only alternative was to start from atheistic presuppositions and to end in nihilism. All philosophy was bad philosophy; and the only solution was dogmatic theology.
Even in entering academic philosophy, many Christian philosophers settle for dogmatic philosophy.
Alvin Plantinga, chief Christian analytic philosopher, essentially rested his argument for Christian philosophy on the idea that he is not “irrational,” even if he can offer no rational defense of his beliefs. He argued that he could legitimately treat “God exists” as a basic belief, in need of no justification.
Since many philosophers treat atheism and naturalism as dogmas, the solution would appear to be dogmatic philosophy of a Christian variety. All philosophy is dogmatic.
My year at the University of Chicago proved otherwise.
1. Philosophy Without Presuppositions
At the University of Chicago, I encountered many people who did not share my presuppositions. But instead, they shared with me a pursuit of philosophical truth unclouded by dogmatic assumptions.
The fact that my professors did not start from the principles of my worldview did not inevitably lead them to the worst version of an opposing worldview. In particular, not starting from a Christian worldview did not lead them to the most amoral and nihilistic version of a naturalistic and atheistic worldview.
Philosophy does not equal bad philosophy.
At the University of Chicago, a Christian’s role in philosophy was not the one portrayed in God’s Not Dead. I did not have to “stand up for truth” against the purveyors of falsehood.
My professor James Conant once referred to the fruitless theist-atheist debates of yesteryear. He diagnosed their error as the lack of sympathy of each participant with the perspective he was criticizing. If you aim to DESTROY the other perspective, your arguments aren’t designed to persuade those who are tempted by that worldview.
Dr. Conant argued instead that you should only criticize views you are, or have been tempted to hold.
The vitriol of these debates is matched by their dogmatism. Dogmatic philosophy is where you just assert things: “You’ve got to start somewhere.” You introduce axioms that suit your prior intuitions.
But this is as bad as criticizing views you already despise. You start from the ideas you like - but other people don’t have the same intuitions; they’re not attracted by the same ideas. We each just assert the ideas we already have.
This is a failure to do philosophy. It is a failure to examine and evaluate even our deepest beliefs and principles.
Instead, Dr. Conant advised that we engage in non-dogmatic philosophy. Is that even possible? Philosophy that doesn’t assume things?
Well, it better be. Philosophy must have the ability to question dogmas and presuppositions; otherwise, it’s just giving expression to irrational spasms of intuition and metaphysics.
If you limit yourself to a non-dogmatic method, you can’t reach to the furthest conclusions. Conant’s papers don’t go nearly as far in their conclusions as some philosophers try to do. (This in spite of their great length.) But they till the philosophical ground, uncovering patterns of thought that underlie dogmatizing on all sides.
(I highly recommend his “Why Kant Is Not a Kantian,” and “Two Varieties of Skepticism.” For even greater length, check out the last two thirds of The Logical Alien.)
The significance of this kind of philosophy is that it addresses philosophers of all creeds and dogmas.
It advances philosophical thought.
It makes progress in the only way philosophy can; by freeing us of our dogmatic assumptions, clearing the way for reality to make itself apparent.
2. The Wittgensteinian School of Thought
I gradually detected that something was different at the University of Chicago. What had troubled me about analytic philosophy elsewhere seemed to be absent. And what troubled me about analytic philosophy seemed also to trouble them.
I asked my graduate advisor about this. He said that the University of Chicago and Pittsburgh belonged to a Wittgensteinian school of philosophy which was distinct from the mainstream of analytic philosophy.
Essentially, while metaphysical naturalism and scientism dominate in many places, Wittgensteinians dissent from scientism, not from religious conviction, but simply because it is bad philosophy. (That is the correct reason to dissent from bad philosophy.)
Metaphysical naturalism is the claim that only the natural exists, the natural being all that can be described in the natural sciences. Scientism is the same claim made epistemologically, that only scientific discourse is valid, so everything true can be reduced to or replaced by scientific discourse.
The Wittgensteinian believes that scientific discourse is not the only valid kind of discourse. Other forms of discourse, or language games, are valid and ineradicable from human life, for example, religious discourse, moral discourse, and discourse about people, minds, and their reasons for doing and believing things. Someone who holds to scientism thinks these all have to be reduced or “operationalized.”
The argument is not that an immaterial soul or God exists. The argument is that science can’t be the only truth. True discourse includes the terrain of personality, mind, morality, and religion.
Admittedly, this leaves open the question whether “God” has a referent. But it argues that in many cases, especially moral ones, there is no question of reference. Moral discourse is not justified because we have discovered an element on the periodic table, Moralanium, present in all acts that are morally right. Nor does moral discourse need to appeal to non-natural, spooky, or queer properties. Believing in and dis-believing in moral properties are two sides of the same coin.
Concerning religious discourse and people, this creates a very different attitude than the predominant scientistic one. It is an attitude of sympathy and understanding, if not sharing belief. This was Wittgenstein’s own attitude. By the end of his life, he was surrounded by believers; they made sure he had Catholic funeral rites.
But Wittgenstein had this perspective much earlier on. A student of Bertrand Russell and a fellow traveler with the logical positivists - the New Atheist academic movement of their day - Wittgenstein himself gave expression to the idea that only scientific discourse was meaningful in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. However, he took a different moral from this than the dismissive attitude of the positivists.
While attending the logical positivists’ gatherings (the Vienna Circle), he was often off in the corner reading books of poetry and other literature that the positivists had consigned to the bin of “meaninglessness.” Wittgenstein thought that these other forms of discourse, while they could not say anything verifiable or meaningful, were the realm of the only things that mattered:
“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched” (Tractatus, 6.52).
He later gave up even on the positivist restriction, in his Philosophical Investigations, arguing that language had many other roles than expressing scientific truth. This only increased his sympathy for these other uses of language.
Analytic philosophy since Wittgenstein officially abandoned logical positivism but retained the scientistic attitude. Willard Van Orman Quine was a student of the positivists who basically argued for the scientistic view. Daniel Dennett was a student of Quine’s and an heir of his perspective, and one of the four horsemen of New Atheism. On this view, philosophy is continuous with the sciences. Philosophy should aspire to be like science and help to extend a scientific and naturalistic worldview to all areas of life.
However, the Wittgensteinians believe that science is limited. It is one form of human discourse, one language-game, to which the others cannot be reduced. There is truth beyond and outside the sciences, including the “manifest image” of human beings reasoning with each other, evaluating things and actions, seeing the world as a place of action by people. This cannot be reduced to the sciences, and we are apprised of this view of the world simply in virtue of being human.
The role of philosophy is to elucidate this first-personal knowledge, while the sciences describe objects third-personally.
“Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word ‘philosophy’ must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them.)” (Tractatus 4.111)
Wittgensteinians make space for philosophy as it has always been practiced, distinct from modern science and not merely subservient to it.
3. McDowell’s Sophisticated Argument Against Restrictive Naturalism
From this type of philosophizing, I discerned a “sophisticated argument against naturalism,” chiefly from philosopher John McDowell. McDowell argues that, to have a fully adequate account of human beings, one must recognize, in addition to the space of natural law, which science describes, the space of reasons, in which human beings justify their actions and beliefs.
McDowell’s argument is superior to those of Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and ilk. After all, it’s aimed at people who don’t sympathize with Christianity, and it’s made by someone who’s not a Christian. It doesn’t require you to start from a Christian worldview, nor does it require you to adopt a Christian worldview. It moves the football a moderate yardage down the field, no less, no more.
McDowell’s argument proceeds as follows.
To understand human beings, you need to have non-scientific statements about them, especially statements about the reasons we have for doing and believing things.
In Mind and World, he argues this concerning reasons for believing. In knowing or believing something, people bring justifications, answers to the question “Why” they believe what they believe.
But according to a prominent form of empiricism, this “Why?” has to come from a purely causal source. At some level, there was a physical impression - an impact - on our sense organs and that is what gave rise to our beliefs.
But a physical impact on the senses could never serve as a reason to believe something. At best it could provide an explanation - or an excuse - for why this random belief popped into my head.
In McDowell’s words, nothing outside the “space of reasons” can justify a belief.
But someone like Quine, mentioned above, wants to give an account of our beliefs that is fully naturalistic; he wants to provide a naturalistic epistemology. This means that it will reduce to neuro-science, a purely mechanistic and causal account of where our belief came from.
But that can never do duty for a rationale or justification or reason for our belief. And to even understand a belief as a belief we must understand it as held for a reason.
Dennett and his evolutionary explanations of belief encounter the same problem. They can never justify our beliefs. They rather debunk our beliefs and excuse them.
The scientific worldview has no place for reasons, justifications, or rationales. The space of reasons is the space in which human beings speak and act and think.
If the naturalists are right, the space of reasons is just epiphenomenal.
Over in the philosophy of action, philosopher Donald Davidson argued that the correct account of action and of reasons for action is that someone’s reason for action is constituted by a belief-desire pair. The belief and the desire bump around in our head and cause our action as their effect.
Unfortunately, in spite of Davidson’s qualification that the belief and desire must cause our action “in the right way,” this runs into the same problem of excusing and explaining our action, rather than justifying it. In the process, we begin to wonder whether it even is an action anymore: “My belief and desire made me do it!”
If we really believe in the validity of reasons, we will have to admit that scientific and causal discourse are insufficient to speak the whole truth concerning at least human beings.
Given McDowell’s argument, the only way to be fully naturalistic and scientistic would be to excise all talk of justification, rationale, and reasons from ones vocabulary concerning human beings. But this would inevitably leave significant things out.
This is all that McDowell would argue for. Notice how limited McDowell’s argument is. It doesn’t immediately point to a further conclusion, say, a supernaturalist view of human nature.
Talk of reasons is irreducible. But we can argue about what follows from that. In fact, McDowell argues that what follows is a naturalism that is not restrictive, but liberal. He does not think supernaturalism follows.
Philosopher Wilfrid Sellars articulated a distinction between the scientific image of the world, as composed of material particles, waves, forces, etc., and the manifest image, the common human picture of the world as containing persons, emotion, minds, etc.
Naturalistic analytic philosophers have long been attempting to reduce the manifest image to the scientific image.
But according to McDowell’s argument, the manifest image has its own validity. It cannot be reduced to or replaced by the scientific image.
This is a non-dogmatic philosophical argument. It ultimately rests on features of the manifest image - the distinction of reasons from causes and of justifications from excuses. These are contentious, but the only appeal is to the manifest image. No controversial metaphysics or worldview is assumed.
The argument is designed to bring people of all beliefs a few steps along, no less, no more.
4. Non-Dogmatic Philosophers Who Are Christians
Alvin Plantinga defended a parochial Christian philosophy by saying that, even if we can’t justify our beliefs, no one can accuse Christians of being irrational for believing in God. Therefore, there should be a seat at the table for people with his worldview.
This is not a philosophical argument. It is a political plea for religious toleration.
Plantinga famously wrote “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” in which he praised the several decades of getting Christians in philosophy, and advised that Christian philosophers bring the presuppositions and concerns of the Christian community to their philosophizing.
Less well known is the response of D.Z. Phillips, “Advice to Philosophers who are Christian.” Phillips was a Wittgensteinian Christian philosopher who questioned the value of Plantinga and his followers.
It wasn’t necessarily good that Christians had created their own philosophical establishment.
It wasn’t necessarily good that, in addition to a dogmatic positivist philosophy, there now existed a sphere for dogmatic Christian philosophy.
Plantinga wants Christian philosophers to boldly assert that belief in God is “basic” for them (not in need of justification). But asserting your beliefs as “basic” fails to do the philosophical work of showing what is basic, work Wittgenstein did in On Certainty. Phillips writes:
Wittgenstein's work shows the possibility of a common method, a common engagement in disinterested enquiry which Christians and non-Christians alike can participate.
There is a common methodology to philosophy because there is a common human understanding from which we all work. Asking for moral properties to ground moral discourse is a failure to understand and elucidate the common human understanding.
Just ask yourself, in all the moral words I’ve used and claims I’ve made, have I ever spoken about spooky moral properties? Well, then moral claims do not depend on supernatural entities or properties. This is an argument against moral anti-realism that anyone can understand and accept.
My duty as a Christian in philosophy is the same as the role of any person in philosophy: To do philosophy. To engage in disinterested enquiry.
The antidote to bad philosophy is not Christian ideology; it is good philosophy.
The antidote to dogmatic philosophy of a naturalist variety is not dogmatic philosophy of Christian variety; it is non-dogmatic philosophy.
And the University of Chicago was the rare place that taught exactly this kind of philosophy.
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Go Maroons!! What class with Conant did you take?
Excellent exposition. One curious matter:
"Wittgenstein thought that these other forms of discourse, while they could not say anything verifiable or meaningful, were the realm of the only things that mattered."
Things can matter without being meaningful?